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Attending to Identity Cues Reduces the Own-age but not the Own-race Recognition Advantage

Abstract

Adults’ ability to recognize individual faces is shaped by experience. Young adults recognize own-age and own-race faces more accurately than other-age and other-race faces. The own-age and own-race biases have been attributed to differential perceptual experience and to differences in how in-group vs. out-group faces are processed, with in-group faces being processed at the individual level and out-group faces being processed at the categorical level. To examine this social categorization hypothesis, young adults studied young and older faces in Experiment 1 and own- and other-race faces in Experiment 2. During the learning phase the identity-matching group viewed faces in pairs and completed a same/different task designed to enhance attention to individuating cues; the passive-viewing group memorized faces presented individually. After the learning phase, all participants completed an identical old/new recognition task. Both passive-viewing groups showed the expected recognition bias, but divergent patterns were observed in the identity-matching groups. Whereas the identity-matching task eliminated the own-age bias, it neither eliminated nor reduced the own-race bias. Collectively, these results suggest that categorization-individuation processes do not play the same role in explaining the two recognition biases.

Acceptance Date Nov 15, 2017
Publication Date Apr 1, 2019
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Vision Research
Print ISSN 0042-6989
Publisher Elsevier
Pages 184-191
DOI https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2017.11.010
Keywords face recognition; categorization-individuation processes; own-age bias; own-race bias
Publisher URL https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2017.11.010

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